Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz

By Nathan Young on October 7, 2013

On August 15th 2014, The Wizard of Oz will celebrate its 75th anniversary! Crazy, because on the same day it will be my 28th birthday as well! On August 15, 1939, The Wizard of Oz held its red carpet premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. And the rest is history! The movie has gone on to become one of the most popular movies in history. Even today, it’s still popular with many people and is shown to new people to carry on the great movie tradition. For one week a few weeks ago, The Wizard of Oz was shown in IMAX 3D and it broke box office records, no surprise!

For those of you who missed the IMAX 3D version, you can grab a new Blu-Ray DVD. This new Blu-ray release, packaged in a beautiful lenticular slipcase, includes the film both in regular Blu-ray format as well as Blu-ray 3D for those of you with 3D HDTVs. It also comes with the Digital HD Ultraviolet digital download codes so that you can take it with you. Creating the 3D edition took quite a while to perfect. So the quality of this movie is going to be awesome!

The DVD set’s special features (only in 2D) include:

The Making of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a new 69-minute documentary narrated by Martin Sheen that goes from the film’s production days through 75 years of movie love, covering costumes and makeup, the Technicolor work on the film, and stories and myths surrounding it.
Commentary by John Fricke along with cast and crew.
And a sing-along. That’s going to be popular!

The 75th anniversary DVD release is available on Blu-ray (one-disc version, fewer special features), the Blu-ray 3D/Blu-ray/UltraViolet combination, and standard DVD (two discs). For those who need even more, there’s a 75th Anniversary Limited Collector’s Edition, which includes five discs with even more special features, a photo book, set of pins, ruby slippers globe, map of Oz, and flash drive that makes it look like your laptop fell on the Wicked Witch of the East.

I always make sure I get a chance to watch The Wizard of Oz at least once every year, and this next year is going to be special!